Jaeger

Jaeger is a distributed tracing system originally built at Uber and now a CNCF graduated project. It collects, stores, and visualizes traces - the end-to-end path a single request takes as it moves through many microservices - so a developer can see which specific service call added the most latency or where an error was actually thrown, instead of guessing from logs and metrics scattered across several services.

Jaeger v2 rebuilt the project on top of the OpenTelemetry Collector (also in this catalog), so it natively receives OTLP trace data and can be run as an all-in-one binary with UI, collector, and query components for local use, or scaled out with separate storage for production.

Jaeger is a fit for teams running microservices who need to debug cross-service latency and failures directly, complementing metrics-focused tools like Prometheus and Grafana (also in this catalog) - those surface that something is slow or failing, while Jaeger shows exactly where in the request path it happened.